Close Reach (27 page)

Authors: Jonathan Moore

Tags: #Thriller, #Horror, #Suspense

The streak of blood he left on the hot iron immediately started to smoke.

She stood and went to him, stooping to take the flensing knife from the floor beside him. She went out onto the porch. The man she’d hit in the groin was crawling on his elbows across the grass, heading for the generators. She followed him, and he turned over onto his back, his hands up. It was the man whose ankle she’d cut aboard
Freefall.
Her throat was still tight and bruised from the pipe he’d used to choke her.

The flensing knife was heavy, and she was tired from swinging it, tired from everything. She brought the knife up past her shoulder slowly and looked down at the man. His hands were clasped over his chest, his fingers interlocked and prayerful, shaking at her. He might have been begging. She wasn’t sure. She didn’t let him do it for long, and she put her back into the downward stroke.

* * *

Later, after she restarted the generators and put the lights back on, she scrubbed in a second time. Lena’s heart rate was steady. The anesthesiologist had done a good job. She wondered what had driven him to this. The surgeon, too. They must have lost their licenses somehow or been convicted of something. She imagined the kinds of jobs they’d taken, the evil they’d done that had led them to the Colonel and to this little cabin at the land’s end.

It didn’t matter.

She turned back to Lena and finished closing her chest, trying her best to be careful but knowing that if the girl lived through this, the scar would be terrible. When they’d opened her chest, the surgeons had not given any consideration to closing it, so that the wound was jagged and larger than it needed to be. She took up her instruments, and when they were in her hands, she let her mind slide back into its trance.

From the other half of the operating theater she could hear the Colonel’s raspy breath. She’d deal with him later.

* * *

When she was done, she rolled Lena’s gurney closer to the fire. She found a cord of split wood stacked along the side of the cabin and brought in an armload to keep the stove burning. She took the tie-downs from Lena’s gurney and used them to restrain the Colonel. Eventually, his anesthetic would wear off and he’d wake. She’d be there for him, right at his side.

But not as his doctor.

They would have a talk, just the two of them. If he didn’t speak English, she’d make sure he understood. He’d let his sons lift him onto the gurney and let the doctor run the anesthetic into him, thinking that when he woke up, he’d have everything he needed to come back. But he was going to wake in the cold on the porch, with the same dying heart he’d had all his life. And with his son’s severed head on his chest, staring at him. He was going to learn exactly what he’d bought for himself, for his family.

For now, though, he slept, and so did Lena.

Kelly stoked the fire and found a chair on the porch, bringing it in for a place to sit. There was a stock of canned food in the cabin, and she ate from it without tasting a thing, just spooning it into her mouth straight from the cans while she stared at the fire. She’d need her strength for days and weeks to come. So she ate.

It was light outside again.

Down the slope from the cabin, she could see the end of the fjord’s small branch.
La Araña
and the float plane were down there. When she was ready, she would gather the dead men
and put them inside
La Araña
’s bridge. She’d bring the Colonel down and leave him inside somewhere, strapped to his gurney, his eyes blinking against the pressure of the gag. She’d pull the leads from the batteries so the bilge pumps couldn’t run, and she’d use a saw to cut through the raw water intake hose to let the cold fjord pour in.

La Araña
and her men would go down slowly. The surgeon’s plane would keep them company on the bottom.

But that would all come later.

She slept a while in the hardwood chair, waking every few moments to check Lena’s pulse, to watch the color rise back into her face as the fire warmed her. There were drugs in the cabin that she could use to supplement what was left aboard
Freefall.
If Lena made it through this day and the one after, if she didn’t swell up with an infection, she would live. They would wait in the cabin until the girl was rested enough to board the Zodiac, and then they would hide at anchor until Lena was strong enough to survive the passage out of Chile. She held the girl’s hand and leaned down to kiss her fingertips. She put her cheek against Lena’s wrist. Her pulse was soft and slow, but it was there.

Kelly dozed off again, but there was still no rest.

Epilogue

Kelly set the autopilot and let it steer
Freefall
on a northeast course.

They were two hundred miles from the Falkland Islands and would be there the next day unless the weather changed. She hadn’t made any landfalls in Chile since leaving the maze of Patagonia’s fjords. Whatever story she told, she would tell it to the British. No one would lay hands on Lena but the girl’s own countrymen.

For now, Lena was sleeping. Kelly would go to her soon, would slide in next to her and hold her as the boat carried them to Port Stanley and whatever warmth and safety it might offer. But for a moment she just sat in the helm seat and watched the sea ahead.

The sky was gray, and they’d seen no hint of sun in days.

There hadn’t been any ice for a while, but the water was still cold. Where the waves frothed and broke, they were green and white and looked as frigid as any sea she’d sailed. But sometime, whether in a few weeks or a few months, she and Lena would reach the crest of a wave and would see a shaft of sunlight ahead on the horizon lighting the turquoise water it touched. The wind coming over the rail would be as warm as the sun on her face on a late summer afternoon.

Like a blessing.

And maybe she would find something there, in that warmth, the way that once, on a sea just like it, Dean had given her a kiss, and she had savored it on her lips that entire day as this same boat carried her ahead to a future she couldn’t have guessed.

Maybe she would find something like that.

Call it forgiveness, call it redemption. Call it anything.

She could hope.

She touched her knuckles to the thick teak above the companionway doors the way Dean always had when the clouds behind them looked a shade too dark. And then she went below to hold on to the girl.

Acknowledgments

You wouldn’t be holding this book but for the hard work of my agent, Alice Martell, and my editor, Sarah Peed. They believed in the story and then helped make it better. Robert Perry is one of the best yacht designers working today, so I’m truly grateful he took the time to draw
Freefall
; his imagination spurred mine. When it comes to matters of the heart, you can’t beat Nathaniel Boyer, M.D., who answered every question I asked. All authors need first readers, and in that department, I’m blessed to have Maria Wang and Bruce Nakamura, who always find time to help me. And finally, I want to thank Dallas Mayr—he knows why.

About the Author

J
ONATHAN
M
OORE
lives in Hawaii with his wife, Maria. When he’s not writing or fixing his boat, Jonathan is an attorney at a Honolulu firm. Before completing law school in New Orleans, he was an English teacher, a white-water raft guide on the Rio Grande, a counselor at a Texas wilderness camp for juvenile delinquents, and an investigator for a criminal defense attorney in Washington, D.C. His first novel,
Redheads,
was published in November 2013.